The finds suggest that cleanliness meant a lot to the
Vikings. Written sources from medieval England also back up this view. In his
chronicle from 1220 – a couple of centuries after the Vikings had ravaged
England – John of Wallingford described the Vikings as well-groomed
heartbreakers:

”They had also conquered, or planned to conquer, all
the country’s best cities and caused many hardships for the country’s original
citizens, for they were – according to their country’s customs – in the habit
of combing their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their
clothes frequently and to draw attention to themselves by means of many such
frivolous whims. In this way, they sieged the married women’s virtue and
persuaded the daughters of even noble men to become their mistresses,” wrote
Wallingford.

Cleanliness was one of five discussions
ScienceNordic.com has presented to refute the top five popular myths regarding
Vikings. Others include that Vikings wore horned helmets, looked like we do
today, wore clothing admired throughout the world, and were scarred by battle
wounds.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

New findings indicate that the late Stone Age in Africa began
about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. Artifacts found
in a cave reveal residents were carving bone tools, using pigments, making
beads and even using poison 44,000 years ago.

Such artifacts had previously been linked to the San
culture, which was thought to have emerged around 20,000 years ago.

The Later Stone Age in Africa occurred at the same time as Europe's Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved into Europe from Africa and met the Neanderthals about 45,000 years ago.

According to LiveScience.com:

"Our research proves that the Later Stone Age
emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at
about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe,” says researcher
Paola Villa of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. "The differences in technology and culture
between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two regions
chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society."

Traces of civilization have been found going back
nearly 80,000 years in Africa, but these fragments — bone tools, carved beads —
vanish from the archaeological record by about 60,000 years ago.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Archaeologists in Turkey are studying one of the
major transformations in human history ~ the end of the nomadic lifestyle. A team headed by Dr Andrew Fairbairn from the
University of Queensland is joining with a British team to continue excavating the 10,000-year-old village known as Boncuklu
Höyük. The site is one of the earliest villages from the period when
hunter-gatherers ceased their nomadic lifestyle to begin farming.

According to ABC News:

"It's come to be one of the key transformations
in human history because, basically, the development of our civilisations is
routed in a lot of these social and economic transformations that happened
around about this time," Dr Fairbairn told ABC News Online.

He says the site is one of the earliest found just
outside the key Fertile Crescent area of eastern Turkey, Syria and Jordan where
it is thought farming first originated. The site is expected to help
archaeologists understand how humans adapted to a sedentary lifestyle and how
it spread across Europe.

"This farming lifestyle then spreads around the
world - it goes across Europe and it goes across Asia," he said. "And
so where Boncuklu is is that sort of first area where you have this spread of
this new lifestyle.

"We've been very interested to find out whether
it was, as it's always been suspected, due to farming people moving from this
area of origin, the Fertile Crescent ... or whether it was due to the people
who already lived there, lay hunter-gatherer societies, actually starting to
develop and take up new crops and new ways of life. So Boncuklu is one of those
very rare sites that allows us to investigate that time period."

Boncuklu Höyük means "beady mound." It was
discovered about a decade ago by the head of the British excavation team, Dr
Douglas Baird, who was trying to place the excavation of Çatalhöyük in its
regional context and then found Boncuklu, which is 1,000 years older, on the
last day of a field survey.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Historical evidence points to ancient Palmyra ~
sitting today in the middle of the infertile Syrian desert ~ as having been a
major trading metropolis during the Roman Empire. Once a caravan stop that
brought Asian goods west to eager Romans, the site has "always been
conceived as an oasis in the middle of the desert, but it's never been quite
clear what it was living from," says Michal Gawlikowski of the University
of Warsaw.

According to National Geographic:

Among the ruins are grand avenues lined with columns,
triumphal arches, and the remains of an ancient market where traders once
haggled over silk, silver, spices, and dyes from India and China.

To find out what made it all possible, archaeologist
Jørgen Christian Meyer began a four-year survey of the 40 square miles just
north of Palmyra in 2008. The area was targeted for its mountainous terrain,
which channels precious rainwater to otherwise dry streambeds—making the region
marginally less hostile to agriculture.

Through ground inspections and satellite images, the
archaeologists eventually found outlines of more than 20 farming villages
within a few days' walk of the city—adding to about 15 smaller settlements
previously uncovered by other researchers to the west of Palmyra.

The surrounding landscape now appears to have been intensively
farmed and most likely included olive, fig, and pistachio groves—crops known in
the region from Roman accounts and still common in Syria.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Archaeologists will return to a site southeast of the Dead Sea in September to continue investigating one of the largest copper mines of the ancient Middle East. Among other things, they hope to identify the ethnicity of the people who controlled the mines during the 10th century BC.

That’s the period when, based on the Biblical accounts, scholars have traditionally dated the kingdom of Edom, as well as that of David and Solomon of ancient Israel. Khirbat en-Nahas ~ usually shortened to KEN ~ is substantiated as the largest Iron Age (1200 - 500 BC) copper mining and smelting center in the southern Levant.

According to Popular Archaeology:

Recent radiocarbon dating has placed its age indisputably two centuries earlier than scholars had previously thought, pushing back the clock from the long-accepted dates assigned by archaeologists for the center and the kingdom of Edom in which it was located.

It also places its heyday squarely during the time when ancient Edom and the United Monarchy of Israel under kings David and Solomon, according to traditional interpretations of the Biblical account, dominated the region.

The significance of the discoveries at KEN fall within the context of a larger debate about chronology and the credibility of traditional interpretations about the existence of the kingdoms of David and Solomon as depicted in the Hebrew Bible.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

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